The Gospel of St. Matthew

On-line since: 15th January, 2017

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

To
a very great extent the form in which Rudolf Steiner elected to
publish the results of his spiritual research was commentary
rather than expository. Both in the depth of their penetration
and in the width of their reach his twelve lectures on the
Gospel of St. Matthew present a matchless example of what he
could do with this form. They are correspondingly difficult to
summarize. The light here shed from a single steady source
falls, for instance, on the much-discussed pre-Christian sect
of the Essenes and their prophetic understanding of the whole
destiny and function of the Hebrew nation; on the two Saviours
who were to become one in order that that destiny might be
consummated; on a little-known martyr of the first
century
B.C.,
Jeschu ben Pandira, and, through him, at once on
the hidden truths underlying the mysterious genealogies in the
opening chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke and on the great
main stream of oriental religion and philosophy and its true
relation to Christianity.

As
the course draws towards its close, it turns rather to the
mystery of the ‘kingdom’ of the Son of Man and the mental and
volitional threshold which human personality must cross in
order to realise that kingdom and, in doing so, find
its own heaven-born identity.

It
has been widely suggested that a more or less conscious quest
for personal identity is the positive element that underlies
the chaos of modern literature and art. Here the twentieth
century could benefit by recalling the outstanding
discovery of the nineteenth: that understanding, to be
fruitful, must combine with the merely existential a genetic
comprehension of its subject. As these lectures unfold before
the attentive reader the great Judaeo-Christian drama of the
historical emergence, first of racial identity (the
familial self-consciousness of the Hebrew nation) and then, as
its transformation, of that individual spiritual identity which
is pointed to in the Lord's Prayer and more inexorably in the
Sermon on the Mount, the numerous points that have hitherto
separately caught the light unite into a single
flood; and he realises that this is no
sporadic commentary on selected texts that he has been studying
but one of the great religious documents of all time.